Patent investigation becomes easier

Creativity and innovation lies in the heart of European entrepreneurship and must be reinforced through the protection of intellectual property. The EU-funded IPATDOC (Workbench for Interactive Contrastive Analysis of Patent Documentation) developed new patent search engine technology to help achieve this aim.

To ensure that an idea or an innovation is original or competitive, it is important not to miss any patents during patent searches. However, aiming to ensure that no patent is overlooked, current engines tend to include much more irrelevant information which requires time-consuming review of too much material, defeating the purpose.

Against this backdrop, the project team created a highly efficient patent search engine that can retrieve all documentation related to a given patent or patent application. The search engine differs from earlier ones in that it includes an interactive contrastive content analysis engine for better results.

In more detail, the engine helps users extract the most relevant content of a selected patent or patent applications, including differences and similarities between patents. It interactively inspects patent material and conducts a comparative analysis of content, along with metadata such as applicants and timelines.

This is achieved through intensive linguistic analysis and ontological representation of the content using advanced interactive visualisation techniques. The latter helps users explore content more effectively, leading to significantly better results.

Having demonstrated the success of the search engine, the project team created technology that could ultimately support innovation, creativity and protection of intellectual property rights. If the results are exploited, European competitiveness is bound to benefit.